TY - JOUR T1 - Hardware-assisted visibility sorting for unstructured volume rendering. AU - Callahan,Steven P, AU - Ikits,Milan, AU - Comba,João L D, AU - Silva,Cláudio T, PY - 2005/5/5/pubmed PY - 2005/6/1/medline PY - 2005/5/5/entrez SP - 285 EP - 95 JF - IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics JO - IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph VL - 11 IS - 3 N2 - Harvesting the power of modern graphics hardware to solve the complex problem of real-time rendering of large unstructured meshes is a major research goal in the volume visualization community. While, for regular grids, texture-based techniques are well-suited for current GPUs, the steps necessary for rendering unstructured meshes are not so easily mapped to current hardware. We propose a novel volume rendering technique that simplifies the CPU-based processing and shifts much of the sorting burden to the GPU, where it can be performed more efficiently. Our hardware-assisted visibility sorting algorithm is a hybrid technique that operates in both object-space and image-space. In object-space, the algorithm performs a partial sort of the 3D primitives in preparation for rasterization. The goal of the partial sort is to create a list of primitives that generate fragments in nearly sorted order. In image-space, the fragment stream is incrementally sorted using a fixed-depth sorting network. In our algorithm, the object-space work is performed by the CPU and the fragment-level sorting is done completely on the GPU. A prototype implementation of the algorithm demonstrates that the fragment-level sorting achieves rendering rates of between one and six million tetrahedral cells per second on an ATI Radeon 9800. SN - 1077-2626 UR - https://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/citation/15868828/Hardware_assisted_visibility_sorting_for_unstructured_volume_rendering_ DB - PRIME DP - Unbound Medicine ER -